CEVA Inc (CEVA) 2022 Q3 法說會逐字稿

Good day, and welcome to the CEVA, Inc. Third Quarter 2022 Earnings Conference Call. (Operator Instructions) Please note, today's event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Richard Kingston, Vice President, Market Intelligence, Investor and Public Relations. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, Rocco. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to CEVA's third quarter 2022 earnings conference call. I'm joined today by Gideon Wertheizer, Chief Executive Officer; and Yaniv Arieli, Chief Financial Officer of CEVA. Gideon will cover the business aspects and highlights for the third quarter and provide general qualitative data. And Yaniv will then cover the financial results for the third quarter and also provide guidance for the fourth quarter and full year 2022.

I will start with the forward-looking statements. Please note that today's discussion contains forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties as well as assumptions that if they materialize or prove incorrect, could cause the results of CEVA to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements and assumptions. Forward-looking statements include statements regarding market trends and dynamics, including anticipated growth in wireless and Edge AI adoption, and growing market share in Japan; our market position and strategy, including expansion of our design pipeline, increases to our IP content, revenue diversification, and our ability to develop partnerships with key customers and OEMs, and to increase license fees and royalty ASPs; impacts of global economic uncertainty and COVID on our business, including royalties; demand for and benefit of our technologies; expectations and financial guidance regarding future performance, including for the full year 2022 and anticipated royalties for 2023; and the timing and impact of changes to CEVA's management.

For information on the factors that could cause a difference in our results, please refer to our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. These include the scope and duration of the pandemic, including continued restrictions in China; the extent and the length of the restrictions associated with the pandemic, and the impact on customers, consumer demand and the global economy generally; the ability of CEVA's IPs for smarter connected devices to continue to be strong growth drivers for us; our success in penetrating new markets and maintaining our market position in existing markets; the ability of new products incorporating our technologies to achieve market acceptance; the speed and extent of the expansion of the 5G and IoT networks; our ability to execute more base station and IoT license agreements; the effect of intense industry competition and consolidation; global chip market trends, including supply chain issues as a result of COVID-19 and other factors; and our ability to successfully integrate Intrinsix into our business. CEVA assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements or information which speak as of their respective dates.

With that said, I would now like to hand the call over to Gideon.

Thank you, Richard. Welcome everyone, and thank you for joining us today.

CEVA managed to deliver year-over-year revenue growth, both in licensing and royalties, during a difficult economic climate. This highlights our diverse product portfolio and resilient business model. We continue to gain momentum with our wireless and Edge AI adoptions across an expanding customer base as can be seen by our licensing revenue achievements. Our royalty compositions show notable strength in 5G RAN, while lower handset baseband royalties reflect adjustments to inventory level at the back of a slowdown in consumer demand.

Revenue for the third quarter came at $33.7 million, up 3% on a year-over-year basis.

The licensing environment continues to outperform, delivering $22.3 million in licensing revenue on the back of 18 licensing agreements. Customer agreements this quarter are for a broad range of market segments, among which are ADAS, Wi-Fi devices and access points, wireless audio devices, satellite communication and more. We are also expanding our design pipeline, resulting from the unique specialty and focus of our Intrinsix business unit in the defense and RF design spaces.

China and the U.S. were the larger drivers for our business in the quarter, while Japan is also becoming an important market for us due to its large automotive and industrial activities there.

Royalty revenue came in at $11.4 million, up 2% on a year-over year basis. Handset baseband royalties were up 16% year over year, but down 20% sequentially, reflecting the weakening economy and inventory adjustments. Our base station and IoT royalties, on the other hand, were down 3% year-over-year, but up 16% sequentially, driven by growing 5G RAN shipments as our 2 larger OEMs are benefiting from share gain in China and continued 5G CapEx investment in the U.S. Also of note, an OEM customer of ours recently won the majority share of a very sizable RAN deployment in India, which will further contribute to our royalties starting from next year.

Overall, the diversity of products and customers we have under the base station and IoT category led us to report our second highest royalty revenue quarter of $8.2 million for this category and help us to mitigate headwinds in the consumer and mobile spaces. A noteworthy development in relation to our diversity was the third quarter launch of a new wearable device from a major OEM that is enabled by our cellular technology.

That being said, the further deterioration of consumer demand, coupled with extended the COVID-19 restrictions in China, is driving OEMs across the handset and consumer electronic industry to adjust their inventory level. As a result, our royalties are not expected to grow in the fourth quarter as we reach to the holiday season. We remain prudent in managing our investment to drive our diversification strategy and continue to keep close eye on and monitor our operating expenses.

Let me spend the next few minutes to update you on other aspects of our growth strategy, which is to increase our IP content by going up in the value chain and by licensing software IP to OEMs. We believe this will enable us to develop trusted partnership with our key customers and will lead to higher license fees and royalties ASP.

We recently announced the PentaG RAN platform, which extends our portfolio for the 5G RAN market beyond the DSP cores that we already licensed to top tier base station OEMs. PentaG RAN is a comprehensive solution that offer a full baseband chain through integration of CEVA DSP, our proprietary modem accelerator, AI engine and the related software, all required to enable baseband processing for various RAN setting. PentaG RAN reduces the high entry barrier for the RAN chipset market, which is currently exclusive to a very few large OEMs who build their own ASICs or use Xilinx FPGA. It paves the way for semis and OEMs who want to penetrate the space at the back of disaggregation in RAN architecture and the growing adoptions of Open RAN, active antennas, massive MIMO, small cells, and to very promising private networks. The 5G market poses diversified and secular growth opportunity for CEVA, and the PentaG RAN proposition will increase our license revenue and royalty ASP.

The other aspect of our strategy is revenue diversification via software IP to OEMs, which we recently started to engage with customers. We have discussed in the past our strength in wireless and audio IP for wearables devices such True Wireless audio, gaming headset, smartwatches, hearing aid, and down the road, VR and XR headsets. We have more than 50 licensees using our technologies, and our annual shipment unit into this space surpassed 500 million units last year.

These semis and their OEM customer base form a sizable ecosystem of user that need also software IP on top of our hardware. In the last few years, we have invested in building up software IP technology base that included spatial audio, AI-based environmental noise cancellation, voice recognition and IMU-based activity detector. We are taking advantage of our ecosystem to engage and license software IP directly to the OEM. We already signed up a top 5 headset OEM that will use our software IP technologies on top of a chip using our hardware IP. We are actively pursuing and in evaluation with other OEMs and believe this poses a sizable opportunity to grow to our royalty base.

In summary, CEVA is performing well during a challenging environment. We are focusing on things that are in our control and maximizing the available licensing market. Our strategy and dominance in wireless and smart sensing enable us to continue to grow our customer base. And as I pointed earlier, we are looking and content -- at content increase and software IP to further monetize our valued technology. With that said, we are mindful of the current challenging macro environment space and will remain disciplined and prudent in focusing our investment on differentiation and shareholder value.

Last, before handing over the call to Yaniv for the financials, after more than 17 years as the CEO of CEVA, I have decided to retire from the CEO position as of December 31st this year, while continuing to serve as a board member focusing on growth strategies. It was a great honor to serve you over these years where through organic investment and M&A, we managed to transform and pivot CEVA on wireless and smart sensing excellences. In looking over these years, focusing on technologies that reduce entry barriers for our customers, made us stronger and more resilient. CEVA carries a great promise. Its technology edge is undisputable. And its vibrant and relentless culture enable it to see ahead and be committed to execute on this. Gordon Moore of Intel used to say, it's always the next generation that drives business cycle, which I believe more represent the CEVA DNA these days.

As we announced this morning, Amir Panush will take over the CEO role starting January 1st, 2023. Amir has an excellent track record of leadership at large technology companies, including TDK, InvenSense and Qualcomm, and has strong relationships within the industry with many intersections with CEVA's target market. I believe there is no limit to where Amir can take CEVA from here and the market it will expand into under his leadership. I am excited on how this will play out for CEVA and its shareholders.

To all CEVA employees, I'd like to take this opportunity to thank you for your tireless devotion in driving the CEVA strategy and promise. CEVA is giving you the platform to maximize your innovation and to witness how these are proliferated across many products and markets. I am proud of your achievement and confident that with Amir in the lead, CEVA will continue to be an exciting place to work and grow.

Let me now turn the call over to Yaniv for the financials.

Thank you, Gideon. I wish you all the best in your upcoming retirement, and thank you on behalf of CEVA's management team and employees for many years of achievement, joint work and efforts, and partnership.

I'll now start by reviewing the results of our operations for the third quarter of 2022. Revenue for the third quarter was up 3% to $33.7 million as compared to $32.8 million for the same quarter last year. Revenue breakdown is as follows. Licensing, NRE and related revenue was $22.3 million, reflecting 66% of total revenues, up 3% from $21.6 million for the third quarter of 2021. Royalty revenues were $11.4 million, reflecting 34% of our total revenues, up 2% from $11.2 million for the same quarter last year.

Quarterly gross margin came in lower than expected on GAAP basis but higher on non-GAAP basis. Gross margin was 76% on GAAP basis and 85% on non-GAAP basis compared to our 81% and 84% guidance on GAAP and non-GAAP, respectively. Lower GAAP quarterly gross margins were largely attributed to a one-time impairment of $2 million. Non-GAAP quarterly gross margin excluded approximately a $0.4 million equity-based compensation, and those $2 million of impairment, as well as $0.5 million for the acquired amortizations.

Our GAAP operating expenses for the third quarter was above the high end of our guidance, $29.7 million, due to the same one-time impairment charges associated with our Immervision and ASTRI intangibles. OpEx also included an aggregate equity-based compensation expense of approximately $3.3 million and $4.6 million for the impairment, amortization and write-offs.

Our non-GAAP operating expenses for the third quarter, excluding equity-based compensation impairment amortization and write-offs, were $21.8 million, below the low end of our guidance, as also demonstrated in the prior quarter. And this was due positive FX effect on our expenses, lower outsourcing costs and overall compensation-related expenses.

Our GAAP operating loss for the third quarter was $4 million, down from GAAP operating profit of $1.7 million in the same quarter a year ago. GAAP quarterly operating profit included a one-time equity-based compensation of $3.7 million, and impact of the amortizations of the acquired intangibles of $1.3 million, $0.3 million associated with the Intrinsix acquisition, and the $5.5 million associated with impairments.

Our non-GAAP operating profit was $6.9 million, up 4% from the third quarter in 2021. For the first 9 months of 2022, our non-GAAP operating profit was up 9% year-over-year to $16.9 million, illustrating the growing operating leverage we have achieved as we scale the business.

In the third quarter, we wrote off $15.7 million of deferred tax assets, including withholding tax assets that we will not be able to utilize as a tax credit, which were recorded in the tax line. Non-GAAP tax was $2.2 million, or 34% of pretax income, higher than usual, as we now record tax expenses based on the withholding tax amount when revenues are recognized at the applicable tax rate of 5% to 10%.

U.S. GAAP loss for the quarter was $21.3 million (sic) [$22.3 million], and diluted loss per share was $0.96 for the quarter as compared to net loss of $0.2 million and diluted loss per share of $0.01 for the third quarter of 2021.

Our non-GAAP net income and diluted EPS for the third quarter were $4.7 million and $0.20, flat year-over-year. Net -- GAAP net income and diluted EPS for the third quarter excluded all the items I previously mentioned.

With respect to other related data, shipped units by CEVA's licensees during the third quarter of 2022 were 357 million units, down 23% from the third quarter 2021 reported shipments. 357 million units reported, 78 million units, or 22%, were for handset baseband chips. Base station IoT product shipments were 279 million units, down 20% sequentially and 31% down year over year. Also in the quarter, we learned that one of our customers has begun to deploy its cellular modem technologies in a high profile IoT device for the consumer market. Accordingly, these royalties are being reported as cellular IoT royalties. Overall, base station and IoT royalties in the quarter were the second highest on record, reaching $8.2 million.

As for the balance sheet items, as of the end of September 30, 2022, our cash, cash equivalent balances and marketable securities were $144 million. We continued our buyback program by repurchasing approximately 83,000 shares for $2.3 million. And as of today, around 280,000 shares are still available for repurchase.

Our DSOs for the third quarter was lower than the norm at 31 days, down from prior quarter 44 days, which is closer to our norm level.

During the third quarter, we generated $1.8 million cash from operating activities. Our depreciation and amortization was $1.9 million, and the purchase of fixed assets was $0.8 million.

At the end of the third quarter, our headcount, including the Intrinsix team, was 494 people of whom 411 were engineers. This is up from a total of 492 people at the end of June.

Now for the guidance. As Gideon elaborated earlier, the smartphone and consumer electronic markets are suffering from softer demand, extended COVID-19 measures in China and elevated inventories. We expect this to prolong into the fourth quarter and anticipate our royalty revenue to be lower by about 10% sequentially. Our licensing business is showing good resilience, despite the uncertainty, and expected to be at a similar elevated level of the $22 million.

On an annual basis, our revenue is expected to be in a range of $132.5 million to $135 million, which will represent 8% to 10% annual growth over 2021. Our non-GAAP net income and diluted EPS are also forecasted to show growth of approximately 14% and 12% over 2021, respectively, despite the issues faced this year.

Specifically for the fourth quarter, gross margin is expected to be approximately 80% on GAAP basis and 82% on non-GAAP basis, excluding an aggregate $0.4 million of equity-based compensation expenses and $0.4 million amortization of acquired intangibles.

OpEx for the fourth quarter should be lower than the third quarter. For the fourth quarter, GAAP-based OpEx is expected to be in the range of $25.8 million to $26.3 million. Of the anticipated total operating expenses for the fourth quarter, $3.6 million is expected to be attributed to equity-based compensation expenses, $0.3 million to the Intrinsix holdback-related expenses and $0.5 million for amortization of the acquired intangibles. Non-GAAP OpEx is also expected to be lower than the third quarter as we take immediate measures to align our expense base in the range of $20.8 million to $21.8 million. Net interest income is expected to be approximately $0.4 million. And taxes for the fourth quarter is expected to approximate 27% to 29% on a non-GAAP basis. Last, share count for the fourth quarter is expected to be 24.2 million shares.

Rocco, we can now open the Q&A session, please.

(Operator Instructions) Today's first question comes from Kevin Cassidy at Rosenblatt Securities.

Congratulations, Gideon. All the best, and enjoy your retirement. Congratulations on a successful career.

Thank you.

As we look at the 5G rollout in India, how would you compare that to the rollout you saw in China?

Well, you will doubt, when it comes to 5G RAN, there are 3 significant rollouts in the base station. One is China, of course, the second one is U.S., and the third one is India. These are the largest places where you have amount of base stations. The China and the U.S., the rollout is underway. We expect to go to the next generation. And specifically in China, we mentioned this is now ongoing from 2 respects. One is share gain after the Huawei stockpiles is coming to an end, and our customers are getting and they are getting there with more advanced -- it's actually our most advanced DSP and the most advanced DSP today in the market. India specifically, it's an untapped area. And we start from scratch. Our customers, as we mentioned, got a significant chunk on the tenders there with the deal. It's hard to know -- it's sizable. It's a very big -- I don't know about China. It's not as big as China, but is, for sure, bigger in the U.S. The pace of how fast they're going to roll out this is yet to be determined. But from our standpoint, since we are starting from basically zero, it should be noticeable.

I see. Maybe just to jump over to the -- you mentioned licensing software IP. How do those contracts differ from circuit or hardware IP?

Yes. Kevin, that's a very good question because it relate to how we monetize our dominance in the connectivity side and the chipset side. So when we license our chip, we license to the semiconductor companies, and they build the chip and then go to the OEMs and build the product. There is a large amount of software that the OEM needs either to develop or license. And the fact that they use our DSPs inside give us advantage, because if we provide the software, we are -- we can optimize it because we have this intimate understanding of our IP, how to IP. Now the model when you go to the -- in a software IP is royalty base. So you go to ASP that is percentage of the end product, and the license amount is small. It could be also NRE. So we don't expect to see movement in the licensing part because of the software IP. We do see, and as early as next year, we are going to see a rollout of product, hedge the product that is based in our technology. And that will add to our royalty, ASP royalty level, I would say, starting from next year.

Okay. Great. All the best again.

Thank you.

Ladies and gentlemen, our next question today comes from Chris Reimer with Barclays.

I was wondering if you could give any color around changing in customer demand. You touched on the softness with the handsets and the smartphones. If you could just talk about some of the trends you're seeing with the other verticals.

Yes. So the way we see the demand, it's basically a combination of 2 events that usually does not happen. Usually you -- at certain point, it's circular. It could happen. It's a cyclic one that you have an inventory that is -- it's growing as a result of lower sell-through or lower demand at the end product. So that happens once in a -- it's periodically. It happens once in a while. But what happened specifically in this year, and that's the reason that we see, I would say, I would call it even hard stop from OEM, is that we are moving from a supply constraint where OEMs took and build inventory not because of demand, but because of lack of supply. So they -- wherever they could order, they got. So we are in a situation that suddenly, there is good supply, or even supply, and the demand because of the inflation of other economy factors coming down. So the supply -- the inventory is higher than usual.

Now I -- this is something that goes down anyway because demand is there. It may be lower. So it's a matter of few quarters until we get to a normalized level of inventory and start -- we're going to see demand or shipments picking up. And it's just a matter of time. I wouldn't see this as something that you're going to see for a long time. It's just a matter to clean up a bit, to go to a different level of inventory, and from that point, demand. The impact is primarily in mobile. We see it in mobile. We see significant changes in mobile. The other one is consumer product. The thing we see that we are highly diversified, and we have many products. So we don't see it all over the place. It's at the envelope of this, but not all over the place. And what mitigate all these changes is our, I would say, journey in the base station and IoT that is completely immune from these inventory issues and demand.

Chris, I will add one more thing. What Gideon explained and your question only applies right now to our royalty revenue line and not to licensing. The licensing front, we see it all over the place, whether it's China or the U.S. We still see a lot of chip design starts. And the trends that started off with COVID, they haven't really slowed down. The demand on the royalties is something else in the end product, but not on the innovation and the needs for chips for so many different market segments. So that's still healthy. We've seen the numbers over the past 3 quarters, and all this is also the guidance for us for the fourth quarter, same level and same type of execution that we will try to achieve.

Yes. That's really helpful color. And additionally, given your solid cash position, I'm wondering if you're looking at the M&A environment any differently, considering valuation levels have dropped off maybe a little bit. Is there anything you can comment to as to your pipeline or how you view acquisitions in the near future?

So let me try to help you out with that. I don't think anything has changed dramatically. Obviously valuations have, but the real questions for CEVA is how do we take it in the post-Gideon era? What markets, what add-ons to the IP model can we add in order to increase the business, profitability, growth, and at the end of the day, also shareholder value. We are still at that $144-ish million. We did about $7 million of buybacks in the beginning of the year. And I'm sure that this will be one of the topics that we'll discuss with Amir when he joins us next year and starts to learn about the company and its future opportunity. So there's no immediate M&A plan on board. But for sure, as part of CEVA's future and 3.0 is to continue to find these interesting technologies or interesting add-ons that did work out very nicely in the past and hopefully could take us through the next era as well in the future.

And our next question today comes from Matt Ramsay at Cowen.

This is actually Sean O'Loughlin on for Matt. And Matt apologizes for not being on, but I think he's currently listening to us while being patted down by TSA at JFK Airport. So congrats to you, Gideon. And I wanted to ask about the PentaG RAN platform. Sounds like a pretty exciting expansion of what you're doing in the 5G infrastructure space. Can you maybe talk about either some initial customer feedback on the platform or maybe initial even design wins just in the first couple weeks that you've had it in general availability? And then maybe asking the same question a different way. What was the thought process that led to this product line? Like was this a customer pull? Or was this just an opportunity that you saw to sort of enter the 5G -- maybe the private 5G radio network market?

Thanks for asking the question. These are both a question of things that we are considering for a while now. So there is a big difference in the base station architecture and the landscape, the supplier landscape between LTE and 5G. In LTE, it was completely vertically integrated, meaning there was those Huawei, Nokia, Ericsson, ZTE, to a lesser extent, Samsung, those guys were controlling the whole base station equipment, and they build their own chips for their purposes. And we were riding on this one because we have, as you know, we have 2 out of these 5 that I mentioned that use our technology exclusively. And when it comes to 5G, the architecture, because the 5G is much more ubiquitous, meaning you have new usage models for the 5G. It's not just serving the handset. It's not just cell thing. It's more industrial, it's automotive, it's cellular IoT, it's meters. So it's all under the new 5G mission. And as a result of it, the architecture itself is completely revolutionized in terms of having new form factors of 5G. Could be small cells. It could be private network that you mentioned. It could be active antenna. It will be Open RAN.

So these are different solutions under the base station RAN proposition that are -- the people are looking in to do. And this attract many newcomers into the space. It could be semiconductor companies. Could be new OEM that wants to build their own chips. It could be India that wants to be independent in this. We are getting all these inquiries and questions and to do it. And what we found out that there is between our traditional business model of licensing the processor, the DSP for their purposes, and what customers need in order to really be there and to be independent, there is a gap. And we decided to step forward and develop the platform that is called PentaG RAN, which is a more comprehensive and more -- a higher integrated solution. So it's not just the DSPs. The DSP and all other components that build their digital part of the base station RAN. It could be in the antenna side. It could be in the base station itself.

And we are going to customers, and that looks like it hit the sweet spot where they need it. And we are optimistic about being us, and that's the -- going up in the value chain. Not anymore, not just the DSP that applies to very big companies with large R&D centers and capabilities, but going to smaller scale company, either it's semiconductor, either it's even operators in India that want to build a chip, Open RAN companies. We see large newcomers that could be candidate for this type solution and complementary things that we are adding like software, and also with Intrinsix do part of the design for them. So it's exciting place. For us, 5G RAN, after quite a while time of building the momentum there, become a secular product. And especially in these days, where everything is kind of suffering and facing headwinds, this is something that looks like secular.

Yes, very helpful summary there. And then if I could just stay in on that same topic, if I could just summarize and then maybe ask a second question on that PentaG platform. But it sounds like then what you're looking to do is not necessarily allow customers to directly compete with the Nokias and Ericssons of the world, but rather just to implement them in the smaller or more niche areas than would maybe normally be served by those large OEMs. So is that the right way to think about it? And then do you have an internal estimate for maybe like the size of this opportunity? And then finally, like when should we think about materiality to the model there?

Yes, that's an accurate perspective of what the idea is. The idea is to reduce the entry barriers for the newcomer. Now, there are all sorts of estimations about how big it is. For us, it's a bit difficult to decipher the time line of what it's going to do. The focus now is to engage with customer and see this under the licensing revenue. And the royalties, as you know, in this space is higher significantly where we charge for consumer electronics, because we have higher share and the volume is lower. It's a promising space. And our focus now is just to engage with those customers that wants to get into this market, and as I said, there are plenty.

Super helpful. Congrats again, Gideon.

Thank you.

And our next question comes from Martin Yang at Oppenheimer.

Again, also please, I would also include my congratulations to you, Gideon, on your upcoming retirement. My question on the quarter is, what's your view on the vent inventory reduction period that you see in handset and consumer electronics? And how long would it last, in your opinion, into 2023?

Yes. For where we are in the value chain, it's hard to know exactly how long will it take. I heard Qualcomm is saying it's 2 quarters. 2 quarters. We are in the same space with them. So I would think about in a similar way that it's 2 quarters before we get to a normal level of inventory that we start seeing demand picking up.

Got it. And a follow-up on the relevant impact on licensing activities. I know you haven't seen any licensing activities slowing down. But do you think that other macro factors could have either negative or positive impact on your licensing into next year?

No. At least when it comes to Q4, we don't see indication for such a thing. Of course, licensing is -- can be lumpy. People can make decisions. I would say that places like China, they still look beyond the crisis. Everybody knows that's temporary. It's a wave, still relates to the COVID. And the demand for chips and the connected devices, that's something that is sustainable. And we don't see right now any slowdown in the adoptions or starting of new projects where our IP gets into the picture.

Congrats again.

(Operator Instructions) Our next question comes from Suji Desilva with ROTH Capital.

Gideon, I congratulate you on your retirement, but I don't think you know quite how to retire. So we'll see how this goes.

Thank you.

So the 5G edge, thank you for the answer before. Very detailed on the prior question. But I'm wondering, since there are new players in semis and OEMs, if they're considering just kind of leapfrogging, doing 5G like in Ericsson, Nokia, and just including AI at the edge or including Wi-Fi and putting it all together? Are you seeing those kind of fixed wireless asset type of, access kind of boxes that are -- kind of combine all that?

Yes. Suji, I think it's by product. It's not a highlight feature. Yes, everybody that build a 5G RAN SoC, whether it's for the macro or the small cells or the antenna, think of Edge AI functionality. And that's exactly where we step in. We are not going onto the NVIDIA spaces, so all those guys that build servers. They need -- they have an application in mind, very well defined. They know exactly the performance, and that's a place that we get. Another aspect is in China. One of the things that you see in China is that because the export control and the limitation on AI for Edge AI -- for server or compute, what they have in mind, and we see it more than in the West, is they say okay, let's move -- let's make our end devices smarter. So we offload from the cloud into the device, whether it's a surveillance camera, whether it's a smartphone, whether it's a car. So what we see is seeing a lot of interest in China for Edge AI into the device itself in order to offload more functionality from, let's say, handicapped now server AI.

That's a very interesting perspective. And then also just a follow-up on the automotive business. Can you just talk about an update as to the automotive customers, that the timing of revenue there, what the progress there is?

This is an industry that you have to take a deep breath before you see something. Once you see it, it's a 10-year cycle. I believe that when it comes to us, we're going to see 2024, 2025, a size of about millions rollout of chips based on our technology. It's an ongoing process. It's -- they have to follow the steps that they need, safety and qualification and going up Tier 1 OEMs and build the car. So 2024, 2025, that's the latest update that we got for those customers that use us.

Congratulations again, Gideon.

Thank you. Thank you.

And ladies and gentlemen, this concludes the question-and-answer session. I'd like to turn the conference back over to Richard Kingston for closing remarks.

the Wells Fargo 6th Annual TMT Summit, November 29 to December 1 in Las Vegas; the Consumer Electronics Show, CES, January 5 through 8, 2023 in Las Vegas. And at that show, Gideon, our CEO, will be in attendance, and our new CEO also, Amir Panush, will also be in attendance in CES this year. And finally, we'll also be attending the 25th Annual Needham Growth Conference, January 10 through 12 in New York. For further information on these events and all events we will be participating in can be found on the Investors section of our website. And that's it for now. Thank you, and goodbye.

Thank you, sir. This concludes today's conference call. We thank you all for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect your lines, and have a wonderful day.